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scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-11-12 07:48 pm
The Big Idea: Stewart Hotston
Information is the name of the game, and today’s Big Idea has a lot of it! From quantum mechanics to Diet Coke, author Stewart Hotston takes you on a ride through how the galaxy works, and how his new novel, Project Hanuman, came to be.
STEWART HOTSTON:
My fate was sealed in Leicester Square, London when I was six years old and I was taken to see Return of the Jedi. That was the day I fell in love with Space Opera.
From then on, I was a big fan – going so far as to get my PhD in theoretical physics, before ditching academia for ‘a real job’ as my grandmother declared. Over the years I’ve learned to keep my opinions about science fiction to myself – not least because I realise that pointing at a movie in outrage and screaming ‘that’s not how angular momentum works!’ is fun for exactly no one including me. It really isn’t how angular momentum works though.
Instead I’m going to enjoy the story, accept the nonsense for dramatic licence and try not to remind anyone that we’re unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
Honestly, most of the time I’m happy someone made some science fiction at all.
Many of us have some idea of just how weird it would be to be close to a blackhole, and we know that travelling near the speed of light does odd things to our experience of time.
But beyond that, the universe is far weirder than our wildest tropes. There could be moons made of diamond, there could be planets with atmospheres so dense that if there was life inside them it would exist the same way that animals at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans do – via derivative energy sources rather than directly harvesting their local sun’s energy.
One of the big ideas I’ve been fascinated by for a long time now is the role of information in mathematics and, more generally, the universe itself. We tend to think of information as something we collate, gather and record. Except it’s entirely possible that information is the foundation stone of the entire edifice that is reality – that information is Real with a capital R. There’s an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics called Quantum Information Theory (QIT for short) whose entire thesis can be catchily summed up as the ‘Bit before It’.
What holds my ongoing fascination with QIT is how it suggests that every part of reality right down to the most fundamental components are, actually, bits of information. This might sound very esoteric (and, sure, it is) but some of the biggest problems in physics today focus on the nature of information and how that reflects reality.
When I say information I don’t mean how much my six pack of caffeine free Diet Coke costs nor even what the words caffeine free Diet Coke signify. If it’s not that then what do we mean when we talk about information?
When we talk about information in this cosmic context we talk about information as the thing which defines the very nature of reality. Consider a photon: the photon’s state (you could say the very nature of what it is) is encoded into its wavefunction. A wavefunction here is a mathematical expression for the very nature of the photon – describing among other things, its energy, position, chirality and entanglement. You add those things up and you get the photon. It’s not that information comes from describing the photon, it’s that information makes the photon. The information comes first and, according to this way of seeing the universe, is a real thing (it is THE real thing). Information is more real than the stuff you can touch because it’s the reason you can touch stuff in the first place.
This could feel very philosophical, too much woo-wah to be practical or interesting except to a small coterie of mathematicians, philosophers and physicists. Yet the answer to what information is informs a myriad of real world technologies such as how small we can make computer chips and how fast they can go. It informs subjects such as how birds navigate and how whales detect magnetic fields, and how information is transmitted via mechanisms such as DNA. After all, information is everywhere; information is everything.
If you put your head in the clouds you could see a world in which you could change the information that makes a photon and turn it into something else. Imagine a civilisation that could manipulate the information that builds reality the way you can edit a story on a word processor.
When I came to write my own space opera after years of not knowing the story I wanted to tell, I realised that a central thing I wanted to achieve was to bring space opera into the present by reflecting some of the most cutting-edge physics. You could say the big idea was to answer this question: what would Iain Banks’ Culture look like if it was founded on what we know now about the universe?
Which sounds fine, if overly ambitious, until you think about what that means. It means building civilisations that might categorise themselves not by their access to energy (the famous Khardashev scale) but by how easily they can manipulate information. After all, if you could take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and change the information that makes them hydrogen and reprogram the universe to have them as gold…then the amount of energy you have access to becomes pretty irrelevant (as does gold). Indeed you’d look at those who were stuck with mundane matter as technological primitives.
It’s what Star Trek’s replicators are based on – matter/energy transformation through manipulation of information – after all, you have to know what the information is that expresses hot dogs if you want to turn raw energy into the best hot dog in the galaxy.
If it’s a minor point in Star Trek, for me it’s a major one – what could threaten a civilisation that can turn your laser beams into cotton candy? What would be their struggle if they can access the very fundamental nature of the universe at will?
The thing is science doesn’t explain everything – and here I’m quoting the most brilliant physicist I ever met, Prof Tom McLeish – it’s the art of being wrong constructively. There’s always more to know and, potentially, always someone else who knows it. I settled here – if human brains are limited in how we encounter the universe and hence how we manage to imagine it, all other types of being will also have this category of limitation – be they AI, life evolved from bacteria or giant sentient stars – our shapes will define our experience of the world.
Hence, even if the universe really is information as stuff, we are, all of us, made of that stuff. If we could tweak the world by editing the page we’d still be limited in our ambitions, our scope, by the fact we are beings living inside the system.
“Bit before It” might change the very way we build our society, but I’ve become convinced that the ‘It’, the people processing that information, remain at the heart of the story. And that’s the big idea.
Project Hanuman: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop|Powell’s
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It’s that time of year again where I always manage to get COVID. I have gotten COVID literally every single year since 2020, and pretty much exclusively around the holidays. I also happen to be flying to San Francisco this week and hanging out with a bunch of people while there, so I figured today was a good day to walk into my local Kroger and get a COVID shot.
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